The Pleasure in Telling Racist Jokes
On The Souls of White Jokes by Raúl Pérez
My daddy loved to tell racist jokes. One of his favorite jokes, not in the least funny, was a retort to any positive mention of Black people (“I don’t have anything against Black people,” then a pause, “I think everyone should own one”).
He switched this one up with another favorite, the punchline of which was, “What’s this ‘we’ white man?”
The joke, you see, was that the Lone Ranger wanted to launch an escapade but that Tonto, here voiced by my father, was questioning his settler-colonial-directive.
My father, like so very many white southerners, imagined himself to be Native American, specifically, Cherokee. He was not. Neither was I, although I grew up believing I was. Cut to Shirley, my mother, turning up Cher’s 1973 hit song, “Half-Breed” on the radio in the car and turning to me, “this is your song, isn’t it?”
Racist jokes were neither unique to my family nor to my growing up in the Texas of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, for example, a book with many overtly racist jokes called Truly Tasteless Jokes, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over twenty weeks, as Raúl Pérez reminds us in his new book, The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy, published by Stanford University Press and available at all the usual booksellers.
What are we to make of the pleasure in telling racist jokes? This is the central question of Raúl Pérez’s excellent new book. It arrives at a time when the racist far right is ascendant, partly due to deploying humor and memes to spread white supremacist ideology. The deflection - it’s just a joke - is well rehearsed and frequently deployed. Pérez asks readers to take the fact of racist humor seriously. In so doing, he illuminates a fact about white people that we would rather ignore: we enjoy telling them.
The book opens with a revealing example from a police officer, Sergeant Cleon Brown from Hastings, Michigan, who was raised white and to believe in his own whiteness. In 2017, Brown took one of those commercially available DNA tests. It revealed his genetic ancestry to be “18% Subsaharan African.” After sharing this surprising result with his fellow officers, Brown and his supposedly “new racial identity” became a “running joke at the station,” as his coworkers began to relentless harass him with racist jokes to the point of abuse. Brown sued the city of Hastings, and in 2018 they paid him a meager $65,000 to settle the case, with the added stipulation that Brown had to resign from the force.
Pérez uses this case study as the jumping off point to ask the reader to set aside the excuses made for racist jokes and reflect on the very serious work that this kind of humor does in upholding white supremacy.
The key concept in the book is that of “amused racial contempt.” By this, Pérez means that “racism is not only about ignorance or hate, but about reproducing a pleasurable racial solidarity” (p.48).
Pérez’s intervention strikes me as innovative and important because it provides a way out of the limiting framework of “hate,” and moves us in the direction of the much more troubling terrain of “pleasure,” to explain the enduring appeal of racism and white supremacy. Prominent figures on the far right, such as David Duke, have been saying some version of, “I don’t hate anybody, I just love white people” for decades. That language has now percolated into wider circulation. (In fact, this same language was part of a controversy involving students at Columbia University in 2019.) Pérez’s work helps point us toward understanding that what we colloquially refer to as “hate,” is in fact, a complicated set of emotions that constitute white supremacy, one of which is laughing at, through, and around racist jokes.
Pérez does this by examining amused racial contempt in three contexts: 1) among the far right, in publications such as Tom Metzger’s the printed newsletter White Aryan Resistance and in online forums frequented by the so-called alt-right, 2) in law enforcement, and, 3) among political candidates and elected officials.
These three areas line up with the way I’m thinking about in my Combatting the Far Right project. It’s not only the figures like Tom Metzger on the far right, white supremacy is enacted in and through the state, through law enforcement and among elected officials. (Pérez doesn’t mention the military except in passing and that’s another context to explore).
In selecting these three areas - far right, police, and electeds - Pérez makes a contribution to our understanding of the “extreme” and “mainstream” of white supremacy. The notion of “extremism” when it comes to white supremacy is often a way for white people of more middling political views to take comfort in the fiction they do not have any role in upholding the existing racial order, something I talked about in my first book.
The idea that white people take pleasure in telling racist jokes is at the core of Pérez’s argument here. His emphasis here is on “racial solidarity.” That is, the idea that racist jokes are doing the work of forming racial groups in their repetition.
So, going back to the (perhaps confusing) example of my father’s jokes, part of what he was doing was performing “racial solidarity” among fellow white people with his line about "owning” Black people. He was doing a slightly different thing with his performance as the voice of Tonto. In that joke, he was distancing himself from whiteness and aligning with the putatively Indigenous Tonto character. I’ve thought a lot (/understatement) about what my father’s views on race, and Pérez’s insights here are helpful because they’ve pointed me to both the pleasure he took in telling these jokes and the kinds of solidarity he was trying to signal with those jokes.
But there are gaps here, as well, in how we can understand racist jokes and their reception. I heard these jokes so many times growing up that they were, for me, a kind of “dad joke.” The kind of joke you don’t find funny but instead respond with a groan and a roll of the eyes, while saying, “Oh, Daddy…come on!” I’m sure they still had an effect on me, and that they did that work of racial solidarity for my father, but they didn’t land as funny for everyone.
That’s the thing about the pleasure in telling racist jokes — it’s only “fun” for some people. For other people, those who are the target of these jokes, it’s something else. It causes real harm, it injures people, and it can even incite violence against people.
That’s why I think that Pérez’s argument doesn’t go far enough. There’s an enjoyment in watching others suffer that I’ve come to think of as the most sinister inner nugget at the core of white supremacy. In the Nice White Ladies book, I talked about it as a form of sadomasochism in everyday life ( extending this analysis by my colleague Lynn Chancer). There is perhaps nothing crueler than putting people in cages, and white people love this.
One of the best examples of this is a 2014 study by Stanford University researchers Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt. They investigated what might move the dial on white people’s enthusiastic support of prisons. Researchers informed white participants of the higher racial disparities in incarceration rates; in other words, that African Americans and Hispanic folks are locked up more often than other racial groups. Rather than rousing compassion, they found that white people in the study reported being even more afraid of crime and more likely to support the punitive policies after learning about the racial disparities. It’s not just that we look away from the cruelty of prisons, but when we see that system inflicted disproportionately on Black and Brown people, then we want to turn up the dial for more.
There’s something wrong with the way that we who are raised white come to think of ourselves as better than, more deserving of life, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness than anyone else that is destroying all of us. Could racist jokes be a kind of gallows humor? A recognition of the dying of whiteness and we are all nervously laughing as it all goes down? Perhaps, but I’m not sure.
I’m grateful to Raúl Pérez’s The Souls of White Jokes for helping me understand a bit more about my father’s enjoyment of telling racist jokes.
While I didn’t understand much about the landscape of my father’s, not to mention the world’s, white supremacy back then, I did get that he enjoyed repeating racist jokes. As Sigmund Freud observed, that repetition is key to understanding the drives that motivate us.
We who are raised white have a lot of work to do to unearth and disrupt both the conscious and unconscious drives that motivate us to tell racist jokes, or to simply tolerate their telling.
Indeed. Charlie Rose once asked Toni Morrison why she believed white people continued to be so anti-Black, and she replied: “Because it feels good [to them].”